Sociology of Science

In this article I take a critical look at the origins and sources of Bruno Latour's pluralism as it is expressed in his book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, and compare it to other similar projects (Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, Badiou). I consider the accusations of reductionism and of relativism, and demonstrate that Latour's «empirical metaphysics» is not an ontological reductionism but a pluralist ontology recognising the existence of a plurality of entities and of types of entities. Nor is it an (...) epistemological relativism but an ontological pluralism affirming the existence of a plurality of types of existence. These two strands, pluralist ontology and ontological pluralism, mutually reinforce each other to produce at least the outlines of a robust pluralist realism. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, I will sketch the main features of traditional models of evidence, indicating idealizations in such models that I regard as doing more harm than good. I will then proceed to elaborate on an alternative model of evidence that is functionalist, complex, dynamic, and contextual, which I will call DYNAMIC EVIDENTIAL FUNCTIONALISM. I will demonstrate its application to an illuminating example of scientific inquiry, and defend it from some likely objections. In the second part, (...) I will use that alternative to solve a variety of classic and contemporary problems in the literature on scientific evidence having to do with the empirical basis of science and the use of evidence in public policy. (shrink)

This paper presents five responses to Toril Moi’s question of why study Pierre Bourdieu, dividing them into responses which suppose that Bourdieu’s originality is negligible and responses which do not.

It is tempting for us to imagine John Searle as a lone figure at literary theory conferences. There he is sitting seriously in the audience, amongst a set of fashionable clowns, as he probably thinks of them himself, listening to a clown give a lecture or seminar. Then comes question time. "Barbara, you have question." "Yes..." "Giyathri, you have a question." "Yes..." "Joseph Hillis, you have a question." "Yes..." Finally, having ignored Searle's persistently raised hand, they turn to him. "And (...) you, I can't quite remember your name, but do you have a question?" After the conference, at the dinner, they are all eating together and talking in their jargon and then there is Searle at a table alone. Sure this could and probably would happen to you, but I doubt it happened to John Searle! One reason for doubt is available to us as analytic philosophers. We care about arguments. But the deconstruction trend Searle opposed implies the question: when does an argument begin and when does it end, are there unambiguous signifiers regarding these matters? Once they convince you that there are not, you are going to become stressed. "How am I going to function now as an analytic philosopher? I need another system of text interpretation. This is not for me," you will probably think. But literary theorists and literary critics also depend on making arguments and being able to detect their beginnings and end points. I suspect from the beginning there were prominent literary critics and theorists of the opinion that deconstruction is not a good idea or not a good idea for the average critic - for this reason or some other - and they were very happy that Searle appeared amongst them. (There is no John Searle category to put this in, but there is Searle's biological naturalism.). (shrink)

One of the things that I am struck by in analytic political philosophy is published premise-by-premise reconstructions which are flawed, sometimes severely flawed. Analytic philosophy is renowned for expertise in logic, so I wonder how these get published. There is other stuff that surprises me, or at least makes me wonder, which is similar. I was responding to a paper by Professor Miriam Ronzoni on the basic structure of society, entitled “Two Concepts of the Basic Structure, and their Relevance to (...) Global Justice.” In it, she specifies four propositions and identifies an ambiguity in the third one, or tries to. I was trying to imagine her point of view. I imagined that when she submitted this paper, she thought, "This part with the four propositions is really analytic. They will love that." And when she got published, she believed that this thought was verified. I felt sorry for her and felt it was good of me to point out how various competent analytical philosophers would regard it, in a series of nitpicking contributions on PhilPapers. But then I thought, "Don't people have a reasonable knowledge of what they can and cannot do well by the age at which she submitted." (I remember N - Dr. Nadia Lisovskaya - was trying to make a gift for someone and I suggested to her that she draw something as a gift and she said, "No, I can't do that with my artistic skills," so I tried to come up with another gift idea.) "How do they get in with these weaknesses?" I often wonder about (various) analytic political philosophers. But if they know their weaknesses, I ALSO wonder why do they try to do this? (In the case of Ronzoni, I suppose she can improve: her errors seem not that bad.) I would not try to become a professional juggler, because I just don't have the skill (I think). What motivates her and others (Professor Jonathan Quong, Professor Anca Gheaus, Dr. Richard Child, and many others)? Maybe they think that their errors are harmless in philosophy and they would not, for example, become a builder if they had analogous problems with that craft. But I am not sure though, because of what I experienced in 2023. In September 2023 - September 6th was it? 6/11! - I was forced into hospital with a mental disorder, pretending to be French feminist Simone de Beauvoir. I was moved to North Manchester General Hospital and I met a consultant psychiatrist, Dr. Swan he is called for short. When I first met him, I wondered whether he is a proper doctor and I asked him what is inside the cell. He made an error in his list (to the best of my knowledge): he said that the cell membrane is inside the cell. He is a consultant psychiatrist and he is trying to tamper with my brain and he does not know ABCs of cell biology! ( Cell biology is different from building, of course, but if this kind of error turns up not just in philosophy, but also in such psychiatry, why not in building too? My current psychiatrist, whom I am meeting on Tuesday, seems really clever. But I am wondering whether there is just a book somewhere which tells you something of this form: doing X is how you seem really clever to members of the working class, doing Y is how you seem really clever to the middle class, doing Z is how you seem really clever to the aristocracy. I recall that the comedian Milton Jones has a joke mocking pick-up-artists, pick-up artists being people who apply reliable formulas for seducing women, despite not being rich, romantic, or good-looking [this “or” is different from mutually exclusive “or,” by the way]. But I don't mock them specifically because I believe many people are doing something analogous to pick-up artists: “This is our formula for getting a lectureship job at the University of Manchester despite not being able to do various things Terence would expect.” Note: my title quotes a song by Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan, which I regard as perhaps misleading, the song lyrics that is. All the roads that the man walks down are very similar, I suspect.) . (shrink)

This paper contains a brief pastiche of analytic philosopher Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, responding to the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu.

Communities of nuclear workers have evolved in distinctive contexts. During the Manhattan Project the UK, USA and Canada collectively developed the first reactors, isotope separation plants and atomic bombs and, in the process, nurtured distinct cadres of specialist workers. Their later workplaces were often inherited from wartime facilities, or built anew at isolated locations. For a decade, nuclear specialists were segregated and cossetted to gestate practical expertise. At Oak Ridge Tennessee, for example, the informal ‘Clinch College of Nuclear Knowledge’ aimed (...) to industrialise the use of radioactive materials. ‘We were like children in a toy factory’, said its Director: ‘everyone could play the game of designing new nuclear power piles’. His counterpart at Chalk River, Ontario headed a project ‘completely Canadian in every respect’, while the head of the British project chose the remote Dounreay site in northern Scotland because of design uncertainties in the experimental breeder reactor. With the decline of secrecy during the mid-1950s, the hidden specialists lauded as ‘atomic scientists’ gradually became visible as new breeds of engineers, technologists and technicians responsible for nuclear reactors and power plants. Mutated by their different political contexts, occupational categories, labour affiliations, professional representations and popular depictions, their activities were disputed by distinct audiences. This chapter examines the changing identities of nuclear specialists and the significance of their secure sites. Shaped successively by Cold War secrecy, commercial competition and terrorist threats, nuclear energy remained out of site for wider publics and most nuclear specialists alike. The distinctive episodes reveal the changing working experiences of technical workers in late-twentieth and early twenty-first century environments. (shrink)

WikiSilo is a tool for theorizing across interdisciplinary fields such as Cognitive Science, and provides a vocabulary for talking about the problems of doing so. It can be used to demonstrate that a particular cognitive theory is complete and coherent at multiple levels of discourse, and commensurable with and relevant to a wider domain of cognition. WikiSilo is also a minimalist theory and methodology for effectively doing science. WikiSilo is simultaneously similar to and distinct, as well as integrated and separated (...) from Wikipedia™. This paper will introduce the advantages of WikiSilo for use in the Cognitive Sciences. (shrink)

A qualitative and quantitative understanding of disease variables in relation to local understandings and values is an important dimension that broadens traditional evidence-based medicine (EBM) and is necessary in order to navigate the social perspectives of policymakers. There are dimensions of this research that share the values and practices of feminist research. This paper offers an epistemological analysis of theory and practice that can provide more effective outcomes in women’s health. PATH (Policy Advisory Towards Health) for women, bridges the knowledge (...) gap between research and direct service by providing translational support for community organizations’ legislative policy agendas. (shrink)

Promising new solutions or risking unprecedented harms, science and its technological affordances are increasingly portrayed as matters of global concern, requiring in-kind responses. In a wide range of recent discourses and global initiatives, from the International Summits on Human Gene Editing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, experts and policymakers routinely invoke cosmopolitan aims. The common rhetoric of a shared human future or of one humanity, however, does not always correspond to practice. Global inequality and a lack of accountability (...) within most institutional contexts of international governance render these cosmopolitan proclamations of ‘one human community’ incoherent and even harmful. More generally, there exists no shared normative standard for the cosmopolitan governance of science, with which such global initiatives could be evaluated. Taking a broadly philosophical perspective, the present paper aims to better understand this problem situation, identifying three high-level challenges global governance of technoscience: problematic ideals of technology and science, the unjust formation of “global” concerns, and the limitations of cosmopolitan theory. By holistically engaging these jointly empirical and normative sites of inquiry, scholars can better support humanity’s re-imagination of technoscientific practices within and beyond the nation-state. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a radical departure from the existing philosophical literature on models, modeling-practices, and model-based science. I argue that the various entities and practices called 'models' and 'modeling-practices' are too diverse, too context-sensitive, and serve too many scientific purposes and roles, as to allow for a general philosophical analysis. From this recognition an alternative view emerges that I shall dub model anarchism.

This article is devoted to define and characterize ‘Science’ as a discipline by the fundamental principles of scientific investigation. In particular, we propose and argue that ‘Science’ be defined by a set of principles / criteria which underlies scientific- investigation. We argue that this set must include the following principles: (1) Rationality, (2) Objectivity (3) Universality, (4) Internal Consistency, (5) Uniqueness, (6) Reproducibility, (7) The Principle of Falsification, (8) Simplicity and Elegance and (9) Experimental Observation and Verification. We elaborate, through (...) illustrative examples, the justification of the above set of criteria. `Scientific temper’ essentially means the cultivation of these principles, as attitudes / value-system adopted as “ways of life”. We discuss the relevance of the inculcation of scientific temper in the modern context. Finally, the scope and limitations of the scientific method are highlighted and an attempt is made to dispel several misconceptions and myths associated with Science and scientists. (shrink)

It is mostly agreed that Popper's criterion of falsifiability fails to provide a useful demarcation between science and pseudo-science, because ad-hoc assumptions are always able to save any theory that conflicts with the empirical data, and a characterization of ad-hoc assumptions is lacking. Moreover, adding some testable predictions is not very difficult. It should be emphasized that the Duhem-Quine argument does not simply make the demarcation approximate, but it makes it totally useless. Indeed, no philosophical criterion of demarcation is presently (...) able to rule out even some of the most blatant cases of pseudo-science, not even approximatively. This is in sharp contrast with our firm belief that some theories are clearly not scientific. Where does this belief come from? In this paper I argue that it is necessary and possible to recognize the notion of syntactic simplicity that is able to tell the difference between empirically equivalent scientific and non-scientific theories, with a precision that is adequate to many important practical purposes, and it fully agrees with the judgments generally held in the scientific community. (shrink)

Trust in the scientific enterprise — in science as an institution — is arguably important to individuals’ and societies’ well-being. Although some measures of public trust in science exist, the recipients of that trust are often ambiguous between trusting individual scientists and the scientific community at large. We argue that more precision would be beneficial — specifically, targeting public trust of the scientific community at large — and describe the development and validation of such an instrument: the Scientific Community Trust (...) Index (SCTI). We show the results of initial field testing to establish instrument reliability and validity. We then demonstrate certain advantages of the SCTI against other measures of trust and deference, and present correlations between the SCTI and participant scores in two trust-in-science scenarios. Our results suggest that the SCTI is a useful and compact tool for measuring public trust in the scientific community. (shrink)

Basic concepts in sociology, particularly theoretical sociology, are of a philosopical nature. Like all other branches of science, sociology has its origins in philosophy and has been nourished by it for centuries. Moreover, the subject of this science, in a general sense, is man, who is himself a supernatural existence and needs to know about this field of knowledge.

The authorship policies of scientific journals often assume that in order to be able to properly place credit and responsibility for the content of a collaborative paper we should be able to distinguish the contributions of the various individuals involved. Hence, many journals have introduced a requirement for author contribution statements aimed at making it easier to place credit and responsibility on individual scientists. We argue that from a purely descriptive point of view the practices of collaborating scientists are at (...) odds with the requirement for author contribution statements. We also argue that from a normative point of view the authorship policies may be unnecessary. Our arguments draw on an examination of 35 years of retraction notices in the journal Science. (shrink)

Retractions are rare in science, but there is growing concern about the impact retracted papers have. We present data on the retractions in the journal Science, between 1983 and 2017. Each year, approximately 2.6 papers are retracted; that is about 0.34% of the papers published in the journal. 30% of the retracted papers are retracted within 1 year of publication. Some papers are retracted almost 12 years after publication. 51% of the retracted papers are retracted due to honest mistakes. Smaller (...) research teams of 2–4 scientists are responsible for a disproportionately larger share of the retracted papers especially when it comes to retractions due to honest mistakes. In 60% of the cases all authors sign the retraction notice. (shrink)

I present a heretofore untheorised form of lay science, called extitutional science, whereby lay scientists, by virtue of their collective experience, are able to detect errors committed by institutional scientists and attempt to have them corrected. I argue that the epistemic success of institutional science is enhanced to the extent that it takes up this extitutional criticism. Since this uptake does not occur spontaneously, extitutional interference in the conduct of institutional science is required. I make a proposal for how to (...) secure this epistemically beneficial form of lay interference. (shrink)

The persistence of scientific misconceptions is often attributed to a decline in trust in experts. Against this simplistic picture, we emphasize that misplaced trust in expertise plays a crucial role in sustaining such misconceptions: even laypeople actively seeking expert guidance may nonetheless place their trust in unreliable sources. The paper identifies two main kinds of ’epistemic traps’ that are relevant to this phenomenon. In addition to fake experts who flaunt competence they lack (like pseudoexperts and pseudo-scientists), we emphasise the importance (...) of unreliable experts, who possess relevant credentials but systematically offer unreliable testimony. The resulting picture clashes with the commonplace idea that laypeople bear significant epistemic blame for endorsing misconceptions. Even responsible agents can be misled by unreliable experts who display legitimate credentials: the less evident the source’s unreliability, the less responsible is the agent for being misled. (shrink)

Rival causal and interpretive approaches to explaining social phenomena have important ethical differences. While human actions can be explained as a result of causal mechanisms, as a meaningful choice based on reasons, or as some combination of the two, it is morally important that social scientists respect others by recognizing them as persons. Interpretive explanations directly respect their subjects in this way, while purely causal explanations do not. Yet although causal explanations are not themselves expressions of respect, they can be (...) used in respectful ways if they are incorporated into subjects’ self-directed projects. This can occur when subjects correctly understand and freely adopt researchers’ goals through a process of informed consent. It can also occur when researchers correctly understand and adopt their subject’s goals, using their research to empower those they study. (shrink)

This is a review of The Turing Guide (2017), written by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, Robin Wilson, and others. The review includes a new sociological approach to the problem of computability in physics.

Social and medical scientists frequently produce empirical generalizations that involve concepts partly defined by value judgments. These generalizations, which have been called ‘mixed claims’, raise interesting questions. Does the presence of them in science imply that science is value-laden? Is the value-ladenness of mixed claims special compared to other kinds of value-ladenness of science? Do we lose epistemically if we reformulate these claims as conditional statements? And if we want to allow mixed claims in science, do we need a new (...) account of how to reconcile values with objectivity? Alexandrova (2017, 2018) offers affirmative answers to these questions. In responding to Alexandrova’s arguments, this discussion note motivates negative ones and in doing so casts new light on mixed claims. (shrink)

Modern physics encompasses theoretical and experimental research divided in subfields with specific features. For instance, high energy physics (HEP) attracts significant funding and has distinct organizational structures, i.e., large laboratories and cross-institutional collaborations. Expensive equipment and large experiments create a specific work atmosphere and human relations. While the gender misbalance is characteristic for STEM, early-career researchers are inherently dependent on their supervisors. This raises the question of how satisfied researchers with working in physics are and how different subgroups – female (...) and early-career researchers – perceive their work environment. We empirically investigated job satisfaction and satisfaction with the academic system among physicists (N=123) working in large laboratories, universities, and independent institutes. The scale for measuring the satisfaction with the academic system in physics yielded three factors: experience of research autonomy, opportunities to use one's knowledge, and appreciation of the research by the general public. The results show that physicists are less satisfied with the academic system than with their work environment. Moreover, female scientists and junior researchers experience their jobs more negatively. The results emphasize the need for improving work and research conditions for underprivileged groups in physics. Interestingly, no significant effect was found between different types of academic institutions and general job satisfaction. Finally, physicists felt that their work has not been well understood by the public. (shrink)

When solving a complex problem in a group, should group members always choose the best available solution that they are aware of? In this paper, I build simulation models to show that, perhaps surprisingly, a group of agents who individually randomly follow a better available solution than their own can end up outperforming a group of agents who individually always follow the best available solution. This result has implications for the feminist philosophy of science and social epistemology.